1. Field
The present disclosure relates to a device cradle and device management system, and, more particularly, to a device cradle and device management system to monitor and control a usage time of a portable electronic device.
2. Description of the Background
Many parents wish to have more physical control as well as screen time control over their children's mobile devices. Unfortunately, controlling such devices and their use is not only challenging, but also very time consuming for the parents. In fact, most parents admit to not having a consistent mobile device usage policy or convenient way to enforce that policy. As a consequence, random or ad hoc decisions often result in parent/child conflict.
Device-specific software applications have been used to monitor and control device usage. For example, both free and paid applications attempt to monitor and control which apps can be accessed and/or the amount of screen time available. Applications often use various software techniques to set usage limits and/or “lock down” child devices. And, such applications are affordable, often free, can be used anywhere at any time, and require no accompanying hardware.
However, such software-based management and control options often have drawbacks. For example, it may be difficult to find a quality device control application among the millions of applications available. And, providing authority to control other/eternal devices to a third party application provokes security and privacy concerns when the source of the application is not a well-known entity or provider.
Moreover, management and control applications are often limited to use with a single device or with a single operating system such that all of the devices must be based on that operating system. Others are designed to control only a single device. Many parents have the unenviable task of trying to manage a variety of devices employing more than one operating system across one or more children. In this scenario, the parent would have to acquire, learn, operate and update a number of different management and control applications in order to manage all of the individual devices. Typically, each control application has its own user interface and feature set, making it practically impossible to manage all of the devices in a unified and consistent way. For example, in a family with two children and four devices, the parent would likely have to make changes to four different control applications just to change the amount of screen time a family's two children are allowed to have on a particular day. Furthermore, each control application has no knowledge of the state of any other, leaving it up to the parents to maintain consistency across all of the children's devices.
There is need for a device that helps families organize and manage the everyday use of their children's full range of mobile devices in a simple, cohesive, and unified way, independent of the number of devices, or the operating systems employed.